Sonic the Hedgehog director defects to Nintendo

Hirokazu Yasuhara destroys all hope in the universe of children raised on SEGA in the nineties.

Pitchforks at the ready, everyone! Hirokazu Yasuhara, director of the Mega Drive era Sonic titles, has taken a position at Nintendo, promising to reignite the playground wars (fact: SEGA was best) of the early 1990s, a time before the Internet was even invented.

Yasuhara is now employed at Nintendo NST (as reported by Gamasutra) though Nintendo won't currently reveal what his role is.

Nintendo NST is based in Redmond, Washington, and is the first-party studio that produced, amongst others, Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario vs Donkey Kong.

Previously, Yasuhara helped design the Jak & Daxter and Uncharted games at Naughty Dog before being employed by Namco Bandai.

Yuji Naka is famous for creating early demos for the spiky blue wonder, but it was Yasuhara that directed the Mega Drive classics Sonic the Hedgehog through to Sonic & Knuckles. The more attentive of you might realise that every subsequent game in the once-mighty series hasn't been nearly as good as those original masterpieces.

I'm aware that this news story links pictures from Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I as opposed to, you know, the actual games, but I couldn't find the original game on the website so Sonic 4: Episode I it'll have to be.